An Historical Perspective

Origins of the Profession

Petroleum engineering was recognized as a new and separate field of practice during the first 2 decades of the current century. The name is an acknowledgement that the primary practitioners of the profession were those engaged in the business of producing petroleum. For at least a century, digging or drilling into the Earth to obtain crude oil and/or natural gas had been done in the U.S. and Europe with adaptations of ancient crafts and techniques that had been used to find underground sources of water or salt. These activities produced various drilling techniques, some of which were clearly associated with mining technology. As the volume of drilling activity grew, professionals were attracted to it from other fields of engineering and science, and its transition from a craft to an engineering profession got under way. The identification of a separate profession can be marked as occurring about one-half century after Drake drilled for oil. Warner1 describes how, in 1907, the Kern Oil and Trading Co. of California hired five mining and geology graduates from Stanford U. to do oil-production work. In 1913, the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME) created its Oil and Gas Committee, and the U.S. Bureau of Mines set up its Petroleum and Natural Gas Div. in 1914, with these developments recognized as offshoots from the mining profession. In 1916, the Doherty Training School was organized and operated out of the offices of the Empire Gas & Fuel Co. in Oklahoma.¹ University courses to acknowledge the new profession appeared in 1912, and the first degrees were given in 1916.

Development and Identity of the Profession

A definitive history of the development of petroleum engineering has yet to be written, although the American Petroleum Inst.’s (API’s) History of Petroleum Engineering² provides much information. With a general developmental yardstick that is applicable to all fields of engineering, the stages of petroleum engineering can be identified as cut-and-try (before 1915), measurement and correlation (1915–35), analysis and synthesis (1935–65), and systemization (post-1965).³ Such general divisions are somewhat misleading, however, because a single time scale does not apply to every level and segment of technology that is encompassed by petroleum engineering. A better understanding of the profession’s development can be derived from considering how its various functions unfolded. Until the 1930s, petroleum engineering centered around the drilling, completing, and producing activities associated with individual wells. Improvements in technology took place through activities to upgrade specific techniques and methods in these arenas; to use better materials; to standardize equipment; to measure distances, directions, pressures, temperatures, and formation variances within the wellbore; to recover and analyze core samples and samples of produced fluids; and to control the loss of energies from the natural gas and water that accompanied oil production. The U.S. Bureau of Mines played a key role in these early technological developments, followed by the pursuit of research projects under the sponsorship of API, by establishment of oil company research laboratories, by theoretical and/or experimental studies within universities, and by the creative inventiveness of many individuals. From the last in particular, many service organizations and consulting groups emerged to provide specialized engineering know-how.

During the 1930s, the primary emphasis on production from the individual well gave way to the recognition that the characteristics of the oil reservoir had to be taken into consideration. Leading companies established working groups and/or staffs for reservoir engineering, and the topic began to appear as an item in petroleum engineering curricula. The focus on reservoir engineering received impetus from events that accompanied overproduction of oil after the east Texas oil field was opened, as well as from rejuvenation of older segments of the industry in the Appalachian region that had survived by use of secondary-recovery methods. Public awareness was directed toward the importance of conservation principles, including the concepts of unitization, the best uses of reservoir energy, and the achievement of maximum recoverable oil. Several states enacted laws to ensure that operating practices would be in accordance with the best application of these principles, and the Interstate Oil Compact came into being. These laws and their regulatory implementations not only vectored the technology toward a focus on the nature of petroleum reservoirs and the management of the resource, but also expanded the need for petroleum engineers.

The focus on reservoir engineering accelerated establishment of petroleum industry research laboratories, particularly during the period immediately following World War II. Major research attention was directed toward the principles, processes, and methods for improvement of oil recovery that included waterflooding; high-pressure-gas injection; miscible processes; use of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and other gases; and development of surfactants. The consideration of reservoirs as complex flow systems also brought into play the importance of measuring reservoir characteristics and of producing both physical and mathematical models; the latter led to a leadership role by petroleum technology in the development and use of computers. This expansion and growth of reservoir-engineering principles and their successful applications in many producing situations offered petroleum engineering a new identity and a better way in which the profession could be differentiated from other branches of engineering.⁴

The evolution of reservoir concepts, however, also brought about a new appreciation for the importance of the individual well and the manner in which its characteristics influenced reservoir and recovery events. Where wells were located and how they were drilled, completed, and operated were seen to be related to an understanding of the reservoir and how it might be developed. Advances in drilling and completion technology, such as improved drilling fluids, acidizing, and hydrofracturing; in formation evaluation through logging and well-performance analysis; and in history matching with computers, opened up new possibilities for reservoir development and control. The overall realization was two-fold: first, that the reservoir and its assemblage of wells needed to be considered as an entity and, second, that a detailed understanding of the subsurface environment was critical to all aspects of petroleum engineering.

During the past several decades, consolidation and integration of four major elements of petroleum engineering have occupied the profession. The following lists these elements.
1. Extending our capabilities to gain access to, to couple with, and to operate within a greater portion of the subsurface environment (e.g., offshore locations, overpressured environments, marginal reservoirs, horizontal drilling, complex flow systems, acidizing, and hydrofracturing).
2. Developing methods for detailed characterization of subsurface formations, their fluids, and their surroundings (e.g., geostatistics, well logging, indirect geophysical measurements, well-performance analysis, and basin analysis).
3. Recovering a greater proportion of the petroleum within reservoirs that have been accessed and understanding the transfer operations that accompany the recovery (e.g., a broadened spectrum of injected fluids and fluid additives, phased fluid-injection programs, extensions of reservoir flow paths, in-field drilling, and horizontal wellbores).
4. Systematizing technological management and coupling it with business decision making (e.g., history matching, risk analysis, reservoir management, software packages, and team projects).

The processes of consolidation and integration have depended on and have made increased use of computerized systems for acquiring, organizing, processing, and displaying information in all forms and at all levels of the technological spectrum.

Petroleum Engineering Practitioners

Those who have practiced petroleum engineering from its inception to the present have come from three sources: those who received formal petroleum engineering education, those who were trained in other fields, and those who were unschooled and learned through experience. In its early periods, any new profession tends to be dominated by the latter two sources, and petroleum engineering was no exception. No practicing petroleum engineer held a degree in petroleum engineering before 1915. Warner’s1 tabulation of more than 200 persons designated as “early petroleum engineers (1860–1920)” shows that about 5% of the degrees held by these individuals were in petroleum engineering. This percentage undoubtedly grew rapidly, but how fast is hard to determine because statistics are not readily available for either numbers of students or degrees granted in the first 3 decades of petroleum engineering education. However, the percentage has stayed surprisingly low even until today and even though, as a mature profession, petroleum engineering includes a relatively large component of practitioners who transferred from outside fields. Regular tabulations of petroleum engineering manpower were initiated when the energy crisis of the 1970s developed, and analyses consistently showed that those who held petroleum engineering degrees represented from one-half to two-thirds of those who were engaged in petroleum engineering practice. A 1995 SPE count of its members showed that 58.7% of its U.S. members with a degree in engineering held one in petroleum engineering, and Bureau of Labor statistical reports for 1978–93 indicate that 65.5% of the engineering work force in oil and gas extraction was in the field of petroleum engineering.⁵

An International Technology

Although its spread has not been uniform, petroleum engineering is now practiced worldwide as a sophisticated and mature technology. While some of the earliest uses of drilling as a craft that preceded the emergence of petroleum engineering were found in Europe, a separate profession for petroleum engineering did not develop in Europe as it did in the U.S. The U.S. also proved to offer the more fertile industrial environment for developing and advancing the profession. As a consequence, many techniques that had early origins in Europe, such as rotary drilling and electric well logging, were brought to fruition in the U.S.; and U.S. petroleum engineers became the international leaders in the profession that evolved during the early decades of the century.

The need for petroleum energy, however, was recognized universally, and the nations of western Europe, in particular, were part of the international competition to develop such resources, and the best uses of petroleum engineering practices were competitive elements. U.S. oil companies entered into agreements to explore for and produce oil in other countries before World War II, but it was after that war that the tempo and range of these arrangements exploded. The nations of Europe involved with international petroleum development were in a postwar recovery situation; consequently, the U.S. flow of technology dominated the international petroleum engineering scene. It became common practice for other nations to send their students to this country to obtain degrees in petroleum engineering, in most cases at the expense of their home governments or industries. This practice produced a cadre of leaders in the international petroleum industry who were schooled in U.S. practices of the technology.

Production of petroleum outside the U.S. passed that within the U.S. in the mid-1950s, and, with an increasing level of discovery, development, and use of petroleum, countries that had not considered a need for native petroleum engineers initiated internal programs to ensure that they would have a supply. Much of the infrastructure to support a profession of petroleum engineering within these countries followed the international energy crises of the mid-1970s, a period during which a large number of specialized courses in all aspects of petroleum engineering were offered throughout the world by SPE, by individual companies, by universities, and by for-profit educational vendors.

Within the U.S. today, there are fewer higher-educational programs in petroleum engineering, with a lower student enrollment, than in the rest of the world, a situation opposite that of the 1950s. Extensive research laboratories for advancing the exploration for and recovery of petroleum exist worldwide. The maturity of the profession and the quality of its practices are no longer measured and evaluated solely by the standards of practice in the U.S. These matters are now considered within an international community of petroleum engineers. The Society of Petroleum Engineers, once a predominantly U.S. organization, is international in scope and membership; its non-U.S. membership has grown from about 15.5% during 1960–75 to approximately 45% today.

In as much as the petroleum resources of the U.S. were developed intensively as petroleum engineering was being developed, they are in a more advanced stage of depletion than those in the rest of the world, and annual production in the U.S. is in decline. Future growth and evolution of the technology should be primarily outside the U.S., where development is in a younger phase of its life cycle and where known geological basins have not yet been explored fully. The future technology should be characterized more by global leadership than in the past.

Contributions of the Profession to Society

Petroleum engineering is a part of the overall technology spectrum that has produced the world of today, molding our way of living and impacting our future. Within the spectrum, our profession can claim at least two major, unique contributions. The first is its major contribution to the provision of the energy and chemicals needed to underpin our total technological society. The second is its creation of technological methods for exploring Earth’s inner space and the resources there.

Although the human race has relied on energy and chemicals from many sources, it has found no other source as cheap and as available over the past 2 centuries as Earth’s fossil organic residues. The petroleum engineering profession has brought all available engineering knowledge and methods to bear on the acquisition and development of these resources in fluid form; has embraced and extended their underlying sciences; and has developed techniques of measurement, analysis, synthesis, and management for their understanding and control.

In the broadest sense, what petroleum engineering has is a technology for the general exploration and development of the Earth’s subsurface—a region where humankind does not live but feels compelled to explore, from which it obtains information about the nature and history of the planet, and on which it may depend for resources not available at the planet’s surface. Engineering within the Earth’s subsurface might be likened aptly to that for exploring and developing space. Man enters these environments only in a limited way and, for the most part, gains knowledge of these regions by remote and indirect measurements. Operations are conducted at a distance by means of tools and/or materials that are designed for and placed within the environment for special purposes. In the case of the Earth’s subsurface, the means of access is a well, and the economic incentive for the special purpose of drilling the well is primarily the recovery of petroleum. An important result of finding and producing petroleum is a technology that inherently possesses broader uses and provides a scientific understanding of an unknown region. These are technological and scientific gains that parallel human experiences in probing all kinds of unknown and inaccessible regimes.

This text summarizes a paper that was prepared for the 1998 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, New Orleans, 27–30 September.

References

Warner, C.A.: “Sources of Men,” The History of Petroleum Engineering, API, Washington, DC (1961) 1, Chap. 3.
The History of Petroleum Engineering, API, Washington, DC (1961).
Calhoun, J.C. Jr.: “U.S. Petroleum Engineering Education: A Brief History,” JPT (April 1992) 412.
Calhoun, J.C. Jr.: “Petroleum Engineering—Its Place as a Profession,” JPT (Dec. 1958) 9.
Calhoun, J.C. Jr.: “Engineers in the Petroleum Producing Industry,” JPT (Sept. 1996) 818.This text summarizes a paper that was prepared for the 1998 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, New Orleans, 27–30 Sept.